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Oooooh, now I get it.

Can I tell you a funny joke? Regardless of the Nader voters, Gore actually won in Florida and by a margin of a few thousand votes - still close, but an order of magnitude greater than the few hundred by which Dubya quote-won-unquote - but because of batshit ballot designs, unfair winner-takes-all methodology for awarding electoral college votes, endless bad-faith legal fights and a complete refusal/inability to shift the date of the inauguration, this was only agreed upon after it was too late to do anything about it.

In 2000, the people of Florida and the United States as a whole voted for Al Gore for President, but their intent was stolen from them and the power to decide upon the direction and tone of the following twenty years was given to Bush instead.

Oh, sorry, did I say “funny joke”? I meant something else.

I listen to BBC Radio because it’s still excellent. BBC Radio 6 is my go-to daily station which specialises in new music and has DJs who are passionate and have a lot of freedom, but the station also follows John Peel’s A-B-C format which keeps things nice and grounded. Also, BBC Radio 3 for jazz and classical (unlike Classic FM, which only plays movie soundtracks) and BBC Radio 3 Chill which is self-explanatory.

ABC’s Triple-J deserves an honourable mention. Student radio can be good as well.

The local commercial stations are all homogeneous slurry, lowest common denominator saccharin slop where every shred of character and local identity has been eradicated. I grew up listening to Rock FM (Lancashire) and Trent FM (Nottingham), both were cheesy but authentic local pop stations that have been thoroughly Borged into ultra-branded and means tested chaff. It’s adverts, relentlessly forced-cheery sponsored segments disguises as ‘banter’, desperately insincere attempts at audience engagement, and, occasionally, heavily edited and shortened versions of the same dozen songs.

Plus you’ve got nippes so you can be milked.

Hérë, håvē ßòmê mõrè.

Can you imagine how extraordinary different our lives would be today if Al Gore was the President on 9/11 so Dubya couldn’t use it as an excuse to reboot his Daddy’s war? Fuck every single irredeemable fucktard involved in that deliberate choice.

Yeah, but the people in the Volvo get to walk away.

I’m on a variable rate electricity tariff and I use Home Assistant and iLO to power things on and off automatically, so most of the time it pulls 30-50W. At peak it pulls north of 1.5KW but that’s really rare.

Makes mine look boring.

“How many pornos does a woman need for a week in space? One? A thousand?” - Someone at NASA, probably

In the next Andy Weir book, I bet that’s how he calculates acceleration in zero G.

“I just happened to remember that semen has a viscosity of 93 Penrose and that a palladium vibrates at 6.3e⁷ portisheads per waneshaft when exposed to bicurious voltage. So by spunking on a metal ruler and shorting out a 9v battery on it I made a rudimentary McGlochlon Scale!”

Years ago I ran a pub quiz and one of the categories was “Name the song from this description of the lyrics”:

A low-level government employee abuses his access to national infrastructure to secretly spy on a woman he is obsessed with. He acknowledges that he has a unhealthy obsession and that he really should back off, but quickly managed to convince himself to carry on, assuring the audience that he is still spying on her.

The two most extreme time zones are 26 hours apart, so it’s possible to have a twin born an hour after the other with a birthday two days earlier. With a little planning, that is.

A few notes on terminology: Great Britain is a geographic term, not a legal one. Great Britain is an island divided between England, Scotland and Wales which all, along with Northern Ireland, form the United Kingdom. The demonym of United Kingdom, confusingly, is “British”. Sometimes “Great Britain” is used to specifically refer to the UK without Northern Ireland, though there are plenty of parts of England, Wales and especially Scotland that are also not on Great Britain.

Anyway, to answer your question: the currency of the entire UK is Pound Sterling, which is the same everywhere: £1 in London is the same as £1 in Edinburgh. Some Banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland have permission from their respective devolved governments to print their own banknotes, but they must be backed by Bank of England notes stored in a vault and, importantly, they are not automatically accepted elsewhere. Some large retailers will accept them, but shops in Northern Ireland, England and Wales are under no legal obligation to accept a Scottish banknote, whereas the Bank of England notes are accepted everywhere.

Also, while the banks that issue notes in Northern Ireland and Scotland are just regular, privately-owned commercial banks, the Bank of England is entirely publicly owned and doesn’t offer much in the way of traditional commercial banking services.